Paint making Pokeberry
Price
$25
Duration
5 minute mini
About the Course
In this 5-7 minute workshop we will move through steps to make paint using pokeberry. There will be a follow-up of a longer workshop. My classes are typically 3-4 hours long. Natural dye used in your painting palettes can take a few days, to months to develop. For conserving time I have limited these to quick tutorials on how to make each pigment. Longer and more detailed workshops will be added at a later date and those will be 2 to 3 hours long. This will be listed on the same page as these short tutorials. These tutorials are really to get you prepared for the botanical painting making class you would like to take in the future. Each of the longer sessions goes into the history, culture, of the dye plants color origin. We go through the indepth steps of creating natural dyes, paintings and more.
Your Instructor
Maria Schechter
Maria has been teaching her lived experience for the past 5 years. She is an American interdisciplinary artist. She has been an artist for 30 years and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, and pursued graduate studies at New York University working toward a master’s degree in Visual Art Administration. She later completed a Master in International Business at Schiller International University in Heidelberg, Germany.
Maria's sustainable, ecologically rooted practice is primarily focused on natural dyes, the use of natural materials and mycelium as a medium. The palettes she forages and transforms into painting palettes follow methods used by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh, as well as artists before the late mid- 1800s—including our earliest ancestors. She is committed to continuing these traditional practices, preserving the colors of the natural world from around the world. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions at institutions such as the Anderson Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Bret Waller Gallery, Minnetrista Museum & Garden, Seattle Art Museum and the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, California. Schechter’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including a MacArthur Award nomination 2002, the 2026 CERF+ Get Ready Grant, 2024 DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award, the UCLA Artist Achievement Award, Art and Accessibility Grant UCLA, and the Center for Cultural Innovation Covid-19 Grant. Her writing and work have been featured in Eluxe Magazine, The Ecological Citizen, Nature Evolve Magazine, and Axios. Her businesses include
Soil2Surface Ltd., and includes Ancient Kitchen: this the location of the online learning center because everything starts in the kitchen, Ancient Color Garden the App for those starting their first color garden, and Culture Mapping Color: an App of dye recipes, which plants yield which colors through the use of limited mordants and natural color history.